"Come at me with everything you have," said David, not an inch afraid. "And we'll see who gets dragged into the sweet embrace of the Void first!"
-David Pinprick, to Blake

"I've never done much of true substance and what I do accomplish in my service I fear is only the machinations of the great Barakiel. When I do sleep, I dream that every line you've cast is gathering somewhere into a net with which to snare all of Creation and its Fate."
-Tifon

My hooks in your are gone. You won't notice when I put them back in, but as you have severed this house from the world, so too have I severed your fate from my own. Appreciate it, though I do not know what good it will do you.
-Barakiel

Lord Entropy smiled. It was perhaps one of the worst sights in this universe. He reached out to the boy with a hand that eternally dripped blood. The throne-room was filled with monsters who giggled at Entropy's new plaything.

"We're going to have some fun," said Lord Entropy and the lights in his throne-room went out.
-Lord Entropy

The Black Waterfall is like a vertical river, a waterway as black as a moonless night. The current of the water falls upward, towards the city suspended in the clouds. Swimming back down it is a little harder than going up, simply due to poor desperate remnants of sane physics. As Blake sets sail once more his Angel waves a solemn goodbye.

"Find what it is she has over you," Heaven's Angler intones. "I have a hook and line in you Blake, don't make me have to reel you back in. Solve your mysteries and then return home. And remember, I am always with you, even if you don't see me. I am watching, and I am judging your actions."

And with that He was gone.
-Barakiel

Teja's beauty and words were as paintballs against Blake's ego. They splashed away harmlessly, staining him with her glory but leaving him unscathed. He did not hear her bewitching words and her eyes did not penetrate his essential nature.

She pouted. She glared at Blake, filled with consternation.

"So it's come to this then," Heimerich said. "I do not require my panoply to challenge your formally Blake, God of Night. This putrid attraction we feel for each other must be expunged from this reality. If you pass my test than you shall be added to my being, and we will be as one. I will no longer be tormented by your frustrating existence. If I best you than you must kill me, for your world and for your own sanity. One of us will kill the other and this ridiculousness will be done."

She sat up and folded one leg over the other.

"That is, unless you can make me a better offer. Perhaps you would join the Excrucian cause for my hand?"
-Teja

Evelyn laughs at the child coming to attack the boy, that horrible ogre laugh, and proclaims, "Lesson One: Why the pen is mightier than the chainsaw. Pay attention, children."

And, with that, Benjy begins to transform, his head splitting in two and raising up, his body falling to all fours, a tail extending from his back, dripping with venom, and his chest splitting open with another fanged mouth.

It isn't an imitation of his drawing, per se, so much as the idea in his head, rearing to full scale and living flesh, but it lacks color, save for touches of blue, and its scale is messed up, its three dimensional lines lumpy and shaky, like the drawing itself.

"Lesson Two: How to enjoy the kill."
-Evelyn

She thought of the movie Idiocracy, where water was replaced with Gatorade, no longer essential to the world. She cringed at the thought.
-Cora

His voice is different. Tifon now speaks as the piece of Society he has always tried to curb. It is the vile, xenophobic, and destructive voice of the majority and how-it-should-be. There's even a bit of Hellish undertones scraped from that one time he'd been at a gala ball in the Flames.

"She's performed how many miracles in her brief tenure as Water? And all of them hurt someone. M.P.D. is B.S. It's a scam. I'm not buying it. Cora should be held accountable for her actions. If Baalhermon took the kid then I say the kid's better off in Evil World. Hell, he can take Abby too. The two of them are better off as far away from Cora as possible. Some people are just crazy and they think putting a label on it solves everything!"

"Abby, I hate to break it to you but Cora's been lying. She's just evil. Plain and simple. If I slap you in your pretty little face and the next moment I say I didn't remember what happened are you going to say I have multiple personalities too? Now Cora doesn't have to hide it and there's a place for her - the Dark."

The Power sighs a deep and empty breath.

"What is it about the Water Estate? Where does Barakiel find these nutters? Sharak'tel was, by my count, a maniac. What happens when Evelyn starts emulating this one and we have one and a half genocidal manics on board? I'll bet you the only way Cora's going to make a viable body of water to replace the Falls is if its pulled from the veins of the innocent."

Beneath his voice echoes random voices, each calling out different things: "Why can't she just be normal?", "What's wrong with her?", "Daddy, that lady scares me.", "Lock her up."

He opens his eyes. They're as dull and cold as space - not like the Beyond, but pure loneliness. Every detail in those twin orbs speaks a different tone of hatred - 'you are unnatural', 'you do not belong', 'I know what is right in this world'.

And above all:
'What are you going to do about it, worm?'
-Tifon

Somewhere deep within Cora, Darla is watching, listening, waiting. Her fury is beyond world destruction. The truth had come out, and Darla could feel herself moving closer to Cora, closer to freedom. The large gap had grown smaller as Cora had repressed Darla so much she rarely came out. Now she could feel her power growing. She would make Tifon eat his words. As everything that was bad about Society, the things that Darla feeds on, came crashing into her, she caught a ride, holding onto the negativity the way we all do in our memory, and rode all the way into Tifon himself!
-Darla

"Your changes to history and society are well within your purview as Dominus Societatis. You've broken no laws, and I for one am relieved. You've taken some of the weight of how horrible the world can be off of my shoulders … er, cheeks. But it isn't earning you any brownie points!"
-Meon

A doll floated by … it was one Cora remembered from when she was a kid … she lost it in a move or something. It was a stuffed raccoon, and to her horror, she saw it was stained with blood as it bumped into her leg.
-Aincumis

"You've made a fine enemy today, young Benjamin. If it weren't for you, I think Evelyn would be mine."

And with that, she was gone.
-Jezzebeth

"I'm not going to draw cats anymore," the young boy said sounding distraught.
-Benjamin

"I already warned you about that, Benjamin. You seem to be making enemies at an alarming rate. Are you sure you would rather not be a monster? Or something grander still?"
-Evelyn

Etched onto the bullet were the kind words; "Fuck off Tifon."
-Merrow

The consequences of defying me will be …"

And the Darkest Lord's eyes glittered with excitement.

"Disastrous."
-Lord Entropy

"You can see how long you can keep this one, Creationborn," the Warmain spat. "Believe me, I will exploit this connection we have to it's maximum. Whatever it is you feel …"

She moved close enough to Blake now that he could feel her antigravity.

"However you simians deal with these emotions …"

She passed a hand through the Power of Night's hair. It floated about as if in space.

"I will use it to hang you with!!"

The birds began to attack, swarming down from the sails and swooping to snipe at every ghost, pirate and Noble on the bridge. Amidst the chaos and confusion, between the squawks and beating of hungry wings, the foot-steps of some ethereal steed became louder and louder. With the birds as her smokescreen Teja leaped off of the edge of the Dutchman and onto the back of her horse. It rode away into the Void, it's footsteps lingering longer than it or it's rider.
-Teja

Sharek'Tal moved forward, his scaled claws grabbed Canaan's throat, pressed his trident to his heart, and held his eyes up to his own gaping pools. They grew deep…
So deep.
Dark as the Not itself, but something down there was stirring. Something cruel and malicious and deadly.
-Sharek'Tal (insertname)

The plane hit something amid the clouds - strands so tiny, strung ever so delicately across the water droplets. Everything went to black. Six hours later the plane landed as scheduled. Mr. Leer was the only passenger that day but he'd later find 300 passengers worth of Platinum Super Reward Points on his account.
-Tifon

"Miss, do you know where the Temple of Night is?" the boy asked innocently. "I need to find my mom."

Nara Salumundi smiled. "You're in the wrong place child. This is where one goes if you can hold your breath long enough to plunge into the hidden depths of Atlantis, where the secrets and the treasures are kept hidden in the murky dark. Not a place for children. The Temple of Night on the other hand is that away …"

Nara smiled, closed her star-filled eyes, and took the plunge down, down, down …
-Nara and Benjy

The thing began to descend quickly. Deep below, Davy Jones' Locker quivered. Skeletal pirates and abyssal fishman look in horror as the woman unlocks the doorway with her eyes closed. Bubbles pour out of the metal doorway as the air floods out into the blackness. Nara Salamundi enters the ancient prison with a sigh.

Nara Salamundi floated in the abyss, and the area around her got darker and darker. Tiny twinkling stars began to blossom in the blackness. The cloying aura solidified into a mass of writhing tentacles that sprawled away from the Excrucian at all all angles. All about the miles-long twinkling appendages, stars were falling. These falling stars and the swirling deeps engulfed Tifon and his submarine on all sides.

In the center of the crawling darkness was the Deceiver. With her eyes closed she could still spot anywhere Tifon went. Nothing could be kept secret from her, no mystery could be kept hidden. Even blind she would see any plan he made coming, even if it came from the past. Linear timelines were foreign to her, the natural state of unBeing was chaotic and poetically non-linear. She relished the opportunity to stretch her stolen skin.

The mighty Kraken of blackness howled, shaking all of Atlantis with it's wrath. She was Nara Salamundi, a bleak God of Nothingness. She would complete her mission at any cost.

It was all part of her plan.
-Nara

The zombie fell into the grave without any grace or respect. It writhed around in the wet dirt and mud as the vampire began to bury him.

Red lightning crackled in the sky.
-Canaan and Orlock (Aincumis)

Instead, the frown cracked open into the vastness around them. It spoke its own voice which never pointed back to any origin. "We saw what she did when you could not. Beneath the waters." The hundreds of stolen arms suddenly clasped themselves over the face to silence it.
-Nobody/Old Society

"One last bath-time, kiddy. Time to drown you good and proper. No more reservations! No more despair!" The mass of limbs surged outward, their tips razor-edged and barbed to never let go. The upside-down eyes joined the maw of a mouth in producing an endless torrent of tears. "Time to put wee Tiffie-Wiffie down for sleep."

"You will be back… with us shortly, forever."
-Nobody/Old Society

The next words she spoke rang with the gravity of the eternal night. It was a cadence that Blake sometimes drew upon when showed off of got exceptionally heated. It shook the darkness, made the very stars shake. She spoke a secret, a great weight of destiny into the very time itself. The Night was more than just darkness, and secrets and vastness. The Night was a time. And it was that fact that drove Nara's words, that empowered them.

She said; "Tonight is the night that you will die."

The bleak Goddess has spoken.
-Nara

The Angel of Society took the boy in his arms, arms that embraced the world and protected it from harm, arms that made you feel like a part of something. And then he said; "You may go as you wish. Just remember, one day you will become part of me."
-Barakiel

He patted the boy on the head and pushed him toward Destruction. Now fully withdrawn to the realm of the Nobilis it was natural to try and acquire personal power at the expense of others. The kid was just a pawn, always had been. And Society continued on.
-Tifon

The mirror quivered, and grew black. Hollow fields and haunting emptiness opened up. A violet star burning it's final breath out over a backwards landscape of bleeding trees and empty playgrounds. From a pile of broken dreams and rusted toys crawled a many limbed horror. It stagger-stepped through the nightmare phantasmagoria towards the mirror, before reaching out of it and grabbing Tifon by the lapels as he held the mirror aloft.

He looked deep into his own soul, saw himself reflected there in the Abyss. On this side he was the overseer of everyone, of everything in large groups and collectives. Here he was Everybody. But on the other side, through the mirror darkly, he saw how he could have been if Barakiel had not turned him into a Noble, had not socialized him to the world. Alone in the darkness, his Excrucian nature had festered into this quantum reflection, this cosmic collective of the lost and forgotten.

Today was the day he became Nobody to doom Somebody.

Nobody looked outward from the mirror, and it did not like what he saw.

"Think you could escape us?" it asked. But it wasn't talking to Tifon. Tifon was gone.

It was talking to Benjamin.
-Nobody

Slow footsteps could be heard coming down the Long Hallway towards the courtroom, resonating with power. Each ominous step brought him closer and closer.

The tapestries to Surolam were torn down. Thick dark ones, stitched with a black insignia on a black background, were draped instead. The stained glass windows were covered. A long red carpet, the colour of blood, was rolled out between the pews.

Lord Entropy walked through the door, his face a stony glare.

The whispers and gasps halted. His presence cut short rumors and silenced mutiny. As he walked down the red carpet in the otherwise black courtroom drips of scarlet dropped from his hands and matched the threads below.

"I think we'll dispense with the theatrics, Mr. Dylan," the Darkest Lord intoned, waving a hand. His Nobles moved aside as he strode to the Judge's seat, restored in black marble. The entire courtroom had shifted to reflect his dark magnificence. "Now that I'm here things will proceed in a more orderly fashion …"

"My Lord," cried out Joktan, "I apologize for—"

Entropy raised a bloody finger to silence the giant. He waved his red hand, dismissing them all. "You have each proven your inability to reign over these matters competently.

"I'm taking over because only I have the authority to punish you just because I can. You dare to give yourselves amnesty to my laws? Your Imperators put me in charge of this world, and I do not intend to let them all down by allowing you to upend the authority of my Code!

So I'm not here to hold you accountable for what you've done. I'm here to punish you for being you. And there's nothing you can do about it"

And as long as he was Rex Mundi, he had the ultimate authority to do so. His decisions were absolute, his decrees final. The jury and prosecution melted away into darkness as the new judge, Lord Entropy, rose to his position.

And now that he was here things would end soon. No-one was going anywhere until judgment was pronounced. So was his decree.
-Lord Entropy (also Joktan)

Tom rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly. "Trust me, fledgeling, if I was ever intent on killing you, I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble today."
-Tom